desiccated solipsism

don't you love that phrase?

Henry Porter may have hit something with his piece in Comment is Free. I think it originated in the Observer. Lamenting the lack of a contemporary Orwell or Dickens - or an English Havel or Pamuk - he writes: "What has happened is partly due to the politicisation of thinking in the last 10 years, but there must also be something in the fact that about 90 per cent of writers and public intellectuals voted Labour in 1997. With Tony Blair's victory, they eased back. The new Prime Minister seemed to be so completely the product of their own values and at one with their view of society that there was no longer any need to concentrate."

I certainly hope this is not the case! I had thought that the utter, abject failure of New Labour to be even as honestly evil as Thatcher's mob had sent people scurrying to lick their wounds, quietly giving up the hope that saw them (us) through the Dark Years.

Is Porter saying the intellectual elite of this country thinks the current state of affairs is okay??

The baroque opinion is that the change has been so swift and terrible that our heads are still reeling: no one knows what to think. However, look about you: NHS hospitals that can't feed patients properly. Schools that can't educate kids properly. Teachers who have been educated to a fine level of ignorance in the same system (sorry, all you teachers out there! I dare you to parse a sentence of my choosing and we'll see who has the last laugh). Crumbling streets, people who can't heat their homes, trains that don't run, "getting single mothers back to work", the Olympics. What a sop THAT is to feed to the people of the East End! Loyalty cards!

We're so busy believing all the pap we hear about how great things are that the writers have yet to catch their breath and take an assessment of the situation. At least, that's what I hope. Even the Victorians weren't as deluded as we are.

The Tart of Fiction quoted my favourite sentence from this piece: "Nowadays, there seem to be an awful lot of middle-aged blokes dragging their tortured souls around the literary circuit, fretting about their display in Waterstone's." (This reads really well if you've only just finished reading about how all the Waterstones are going to be either shut, or scaled back! Fiction, apparently. Anything else, you can get it online if you want it so bad. And by the way, 2 out of 3 book sales in the UK are through a Waterstones. My career is finished, before it even started.)

We had better get our heads straight & soon. It also strikes me that what is missing is not the ability to analyse - though, as Porter points out, it is the lawyers who are doing it - it is the capacity for Art. Proper, transformative, celestial, redemptive Art, of the kind that takes something and makes something else of it, forcing us to see our own existence in a new way: Tolstoy, Mozart. We're all journalists now.

I will add to this, in a not-very-articulate fashion (as befits a sick person who less than two hours ago was having a nightmare involving a Bad Lady and a doll), the following concerns:

Porter mentions our celebrity-obsessed media. We must take responsibility for that. A friend brought me in hospital a copy of Heat magazine: it contains an article on what Jen thought of Brad and Angelina's baby pictures!!! Brilliant and sick as this is, it is not helping us.

I'm thinking the division of speciality in thought is also not helping us: you know, where scientists only know about science, artists only know about pickled sheep (and some useful welding, actually), and novelists only know about their friends and how to play pool. There's no excitement. Everyone else only knows about targets, and by that I do not mean they're down the pub playing darts.

I, and many people far better than myself, have written elsewhere about the need to remember the importance of language to our civil liberties, and of poetry (I know, I would say that) to our ability to make connections and perceive non-linear truth. What really puzzles me is that so many of our - what Porter calls "public intellectuals" - don't seem to be doing much analysis on the current regime's abuses of language - which are as bad here, nearly, as in the States, for all we never had Freedom Toast. But we are thinking in jargon and that is the First Step.